Sunday, March 27, 2011

Quote of the Day

"[Eliot and Lewes] went to parties given by Liszt...and heard three Wagner operas directed by him in the Court Theatre. [Eliot] described her response to Wagner's 'music of the future' in a striking phrase, coined to express her comic sense of inadequacy as a listener to Lohengrin. We must learn, she wrote...'to think of ourselves as tadpoles unprescient of the future frog'. Still, she adds in concession to her own failure to respond to Wagner's difficult harmonies, 'the tadpole is limited to tadpole pleasures; and so, in our state of development, we are swayed by melody'."

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Tadpole pleasures included Rossini and Bellini. No carping on that score, particularly if a crucial decision about the plot of Adam Bede was made in the middle of a performance of Guillaume Tell. (Not but that it might have been more a Schiller thing than a Rossini thing, but still...)

And she was not the only one. There's that scene in The History of Pendennis where Thackeray has his hero choose between going to see Giulia Grisi in Norma and going to hang out with a fellow journo, and the operatically-inclined graduate students in the room (graduate Vic Lit classes being the only place you would ever encounter this book) are jumping up and down going "Dude, the opera!" Okay, there was only one operatically-inclined grad student, and no such luck getting Pen's take on the first Adalgisa. Damn. Plot-driven narrative.

The bad ones never ask where the money comes from. In the bad ones, bills are paid by an invisible fairy.[/end of Marxist rant]

Well, well, well, The Great Gatsby video game... I... don't know what to say. I need a console to play it, I think. What does it mean to win in the GG video game, I wonder? You get to stay on the East Coast, your ideas about human nature still relatively optimistic? Must try it out.